When I'm 64

Kids grown up and parents both dead
many years from now
I could put a loaded weapon to my head
pull the trigger bang and I'm dead,
but I should make it seem natural
- nothing they'd deplore -
so they won't grieve the way that I leave them
when I'm sixty four.

"A new, grown-up relationship"

In October 2016 Theresa May called for the Union to be a "new, grown-up relationship."

However, the power grab underway in relation to the transfer of unreserved (and therefore, in the terms of the Scotland Act, devolved) powers from Brussels, as provided for by the EU Withdrawal Bill, reveals that Westminster's attitude towards Holyrood is far from healthy and adult. Scotland is in an abusive relationship with the UK.

We are told our objections to the Bill are unreasonable in an act of sustained gaslighting. It is obvious to anyone that the day the EU Withdrawal Bill, as it currently stands, is passed, is the day the Union nakedly and unashamedly becomes an anschluss. The serried ranks of Conservative, Labour and LibDem MPs at Westminster, alike in their contempt for Scotland's rights, bray at the Scottish MPs as the Athenians did at the citizens of Melos, insisting "the strong shall do what they can, and the weak shall suffer what they must."

If the Union was a relationship (as Theresa May claims), in the light of the provisions of the EU Withdrawal Bill, it's clear a night out would go something like this ...

[Westminster & Holyrood go to a nice restaurant]  

WM: "I'll order for you, darling. I know what you like"
HR: "But what if I want something else?"
WM: "Tough"
HR: "What if I don't want anything at all?"
WM: "Tough" 

[The head waiter arrives] 

HW: "Today's special is genetically modified chlorinated chicken prepared in a special jus of substandard food safety regulations, chargrilled over fracked petrochemicals by underpaid kitchen staff with no health care provision"
HR: "I don't want that!"
WM: "Tough" 

[The sommelier arrives] 

SM: "Would you perhaps like an aperatif? We have a delightful Scotch whisky from Peru"
HR: "What? That's my recipe! Who let them pass it off as their own? I don't want that!"
WM: "Tough!" 

[A little later] 

WM: "Are you enjoying your meal, darling?"
HR: "No! I didn't get what I want and had no say in choosing it. And I'm beginning to feel ill."
WM: "That's wonderful darling, I've just posted a glowing review of the meal on your behalf on the BBC food website. And you don't mind if I slip some Nembutal in your wine, do you?  Wouldn't want any issues with consent later on would we."
HR: "Later on?  What are you talking about?  I'm going straight home after this."
WM: "Tough."

Embankment

(On the clearing of vegetation at Mount Florida train station)

Every morning I stood on the station platform.
I waited for the train to arrive and take me to work
and imagined myself jobless, destitute and vagrant,
secretly bivouaced among the undergrowth,
on the embankment rising opposite,
on the other side of the tracks.

I wasn't reflecting on my good fortune.
It was a wage-slave's fantasy of penniless freedom.

I imagined this other me observing myself on the platform,
unseen, nonchalant, as he hid among silver birch and ivy
and renegade rhodidendron, concealed by rioting weeds,
recently awake after a luxury of oversleeping,
innocent of everything I am accused of by the alarm clock,
enjoying supreme indolence as his inalienable birthright,
holding the ineloquence of human speech in contempt,
preferring instead the melodious declarations of nature. 

One morning I arrived on the platform
and found the embankment bare.
Cleared of vegetation. I don't know why.
In my imagination it was the aftermath of Wounded Knee.
A seventh cavalry of council employees in luminous tabards
had cut down the trees and cleared the weeds
wielding strimmers rather than sabres,
and left my imagined self and all his companions
dead or in disarray. The platform was no longer a stage
on which to dream myself an audience among the birds and beasts,
and instead of ghost dancers
rolling away the wicked world in their hypoxic delirium,
the world arrives once more in locomotive form, right on time,
so all its mundane Monday morning massacres may ensue.

I board the train and pretend there is some quiet dignity
among people doing their best under bad circumstances,
trying their hardest without even the hope of anything more
than a place to die in the presence of someone they love
at the end of the line. But there is no dignity.
All chance of that has gone: this fictitious dignity
with which we presume to mitigate our humiliation,
one of the precious little lies we collect and keep secret and safe
trotting it out to the tip of our tongue as if walking the plank
to protect it from the truth prowling at the back of the mind,
spilling it in speech to say we are all in the same boat
whenever we think we can escape degradation in camaraderie
only to discover the ubiquity of betrayal, routine, timetabled,
regular as clockwork, running on schedule every morning.

We are made infinite but anonymous, a sacrifice on an altar,
and our prayers are offered up to one god but received by another
misdirected by some cosmic cross-purpose,
returned to sender, damaged, envelope opened and badly resealed,
some contents missing, and that is the only mystery that resides
in this chaos, this untransubstantiated ash. Every performance
is a tragedy. The performer tries to dream an ego into existence
but every audience departs, leaving him alone
with his hollow howling half-self, staring at the bare embankment.

"Pure unadulterated sophism"

"Amazingly empty of any analysis" 

"One of the most pretentious Internet comments I've ever seen" 

"Pure unadulterated sophism"

(Various commentators described the remarks below using these words when I posted these remarks in a comment thread online. For that reason I thought they were ideal for a blog post) 

Prominent commentators often remark on situations in ways that are perceived or portrayed as somehow "dangerous" without serious challenge because of the profile they already enjoy. They discuss alienated youth, the crisis of masculinity, disenfranchised young men whose energies are misdirected in destructive (and self-destructive) ways. However, the subject of their remarks is rarely qualified to speak on their own behalf. If the young men spoke for themselves their remarks would almost certainly not receive the general approbation enjoyed by commentators with a more established presence in our print and online media, even if their remarks had the exact same content.

For example, consider sociologists' responses to criticism of that tedious sociological shibboleth "toxic masculinity." This concept is typically deployed to explain dismissive, aggressive, hostile and entitled behaviours in men. Criticisms of this concept are almost invariably met by keyboard sociologists with dismissive, aggressive, hostile, and entitled derision and condescension - all the characteristics they attribute to what they claim to describe in others - to the extent that their response might be called "toxic sociology." The young marginalised frustrated and confused men they describe would never be permitted to make the points they have made. It is clear that the sociologists are somehow superiour and therefore must be indulged.

The reason for their response is a more general problem, however, and one that underlies the disenfrachisement and alienation which is being remarked upon. Our democracy is broken. That is, our basis for constructive debate, for discourse that extends respect towards the self and others, has broken down. People do not make statements because they believe these statements to be right. They make these statements because they believe making these statements allow to belong to a group that is in the right, the group of people who make these statements. Our discourse is trashed and each side of the debate points the finger of blame for this desolation of debate at the other. This isn't a left/right thing. The left will blame the right and the right will blame the left but it's a result of us allowing "left" and "right" to become identities. Even the atheist thinks God is on his side.

I am not a centrist (far from it) but I recognise the existence of a viable centre ground implies the existence and validity of alternative views surrounding it. But we are currently (both the self-identified "left" and "right") in the process of defenestrating the centre through a shattered Overton window as we spiral inexorably towards another Hobsbawmian "age of extremes," each of us certain of our ultimate vindication and worryingly relaxed about the price we must pay to achieve it.

The solution cannot be found in institutional reform. It doesn't matter what structures we put in place to ensure all voices are heard and all interests represented in a just and equitable way. As long as our politics are based on believing we are right and rallying support on that basis, rather than contemplating the possibility we are wrong and staring into the abyss of Sophoclean error, our politics will always deteriorate in the same way. Every point we recognise or try to prove becomes about whatever prior agenda we seek to confirm. Politics degenerates into pretext.

We need a cultural shift in which standards of discourse are given priority over the content of that discourse. We need the young to learn to criticise on the basis of verifiable evidence and coherent logical argument, irrespective of the point they want to make. We need to stop latching on to whatever helps us prove our bullshit points. We need a politics that is not about being right, but about exploring the ways in which we are wrong.

Per mare, per terra

A bliss of luminous day spent by the sea
restores the joy of long forgotten days to me.
The sea's numinous hiss, its liminal amniosis of sound
revives an ancient gnosis long forgotten, or denied.
Children play. Sand drifts. Focus shifts and stumbles:
all scales and distances jostle and compete for attention,
conspire and converge and meet in new perspectives;
Fibonacci winds up infinite space tight
within the confines of the tiniest of sea shells;
the oystercatcher darts and weaves along the breakers
like a shuttlecock across the great loom of the land
that tries to lock the beach in place, framed between headlands; 
while on the horizon the curvature of the Earth
finally surrenders us to a clear blue sky.

But once I turned my back towards the shore,
closed my ear to the protest and ululation of the gulls,
and the spindrift sigh of the Moon-swung sea
as it exerted its nebulous call, and walked inland.
We each carry inside us a small soft cold clay doll
which bears phantom cuts 
long after our lacerated flesh has healed,
an inert burden that can only accumulate wounds,
a technology of condemnation;
I set off across a deserted inner continent,
an Antarctica of ego,
until at its pole, equidistant from all shores,
at the furthest point from the sea,
I buried the image of my mutilation,
a seed of pain, to blossom in atrocity and shame,
except, for a heart, I had given it a tiny shell,
that carried the sound of the sea
echoing within its spiral halls.

We are saved at last by the indifference of the sea,
which drowns the wraths of countless forgotten Achilles.
The Moon-drunk tide effaces and encompasses time
in its sway and stagger,
and currents bring the memory of distant warmth
from tropical waters. The children play
with the same indifference,
and remind this old exposed fossil fool of similar days,
of this very self-same day, lived by him long ago
before his inner excavations
of the geology and hinterland of time.

Flood

I could live inside this rain for days,
curl up inside its sound forever,
hide inside this shadow of an angel's wing,
wrapped in the feathery whisper, the sweep
of its long slow passage between worlds
heard in the sound of the rain on this roof.

I chose not to believe the warnings,
not because they aren't true: they are true.
I chose not to believe the warnings,
because a greater truth protects me:

what if these words I utter here, just now,
are the only words ever spoken, all others
garbled counterfeits wrenched from the echo
to be misconstrued and disregarded?
What if there is no faithful repetition,
only the tedious rehearsal of error?

What if there is only one woman in the world
and I spend a lifetime learning her face
from all its facets found in the faces of others
until at last we meet,
suddenly and quite unexpectedly,
by coincidence, knowing immediately
our tryst can never be repeated in this world
where all light is shadow to a brighter light,
knowing she is the only woman, I the only man,
and this encounter an impromtu, rebel Eden,

and exchange a single, solitary kiss,
the only kiss, after which the world
may as well end, may as well sink forever
beneath the repetitious percussion of this rain,

and then I see her face recede as I fall,
as I sink into the depths, while her face
remains in the brighter light above the waves,
the kiss still sitting upon her lips
as my sight of it fades and falls into shadow?

I could live inside this rain for days,
curl up inside its sound forever.

Epitaph

You've got it all wrong.
This isn't death.
This is life, unlimited.
We did not live day by day,
we had only a kind of half-life,
one curtailed. The sun rose
and pulled a curtain of light across the stars
that were revealed once more when the sun set,
and only then did we become aware again
of everything of which we are part.
So, you see, you've got it all
the wrong way round: compared to me,
you are the ones under the ground.
You are the animated earth
thirled to the cosmic coin toss of days
where I am once more the stardust,
once more the substance
from which that coin is made,
my connection to the universe restored.
What you call life hides from us
our cosmic inheritance. As Judas,
who was fastened to a tree by rope,
not iron, and by his own hand as well,
could tell you, it was never about the money.
This world is an orphanage,
our mothers midwives to the void,
and in living our lives we are bereft,
but someone has finally come to claim me.
Let this be how you know the void is not empty,
but full to overflowing,
and it is only our finitude that drains it,
for a little while, while it lasts. While it lasts,
the stone on which these words are writ
may not roll away
but we are saved by astronomies of grace
beyond the reach of all our telescopes
as long as the world entire turns.